John Powers

Bad Girls

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett “Oooee — she’s a harlot, she’s a princess.” —Pauline Kael on Anjelica Huston A few weeks ago, New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley had a feminist meltdown, or at least as much of a meltdown as the once–Gray Lady would ever allow in its pages......

The Gipper

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennet All publicity is good, joked Brendan Behan, except an obituary. In this, as in so many things, Ronald Reagan proved a lucky exception. His death last Saturday put a merciful end to a decade of suffering from the cruel, delusional ravages of Alzheimer’s, an affliction no......

Head Over Heels

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett Although Troy wobbles beneath the weight of excessive digital effects — if Helen’s face launched a thousand ships, by god Wolfgang Petersen’s computers will show you every last dinghy — it reminds us that war is always about violent death, shows how ideas of honor usually......
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The First Time

John Powers
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end; then stop.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland There’s something daunting about greatness — it smacks of the museum, if not the mausoleum. That’s why I’m drawn to works done by famous artists......

Please, Sir, I Want Some Moore

John Powers
Fahrenheit 9/11 was clearly not the best movie at the 57th Cannes Film Festival. But it was undeniably the defining film of the historical moment. And so, in a festival that will be remembered for its good humor and modest pleasures, Michael Moore’s cauldron of Bush-scalding agitprop enjoyed a visibility......

Crying Time

John Powers
David Foster Wallace once called Guy Maddin’s pictures “abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fests.” It was easy to see why. The maddeningly original Winnipeg director makes movies so bizarre they seem to come not from Manitoba but Mars. Maddin is not a natural storyteller, and while I personally loved Tales From the......
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The Good Soldier

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett Hours after Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed during a firefight last week in Afghanistan, CNN interviewed one of his fellow soldiers, who looked eerily like the actress Lauren Ambrose from Six Feet Under. “It was shocking,” she said of his death, “because he was an......
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The First Time

John Powers
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end; then stop.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland There’s something daunting about greatness — it smacks of the museum, if not the mausoleum. That’s why I’m drawn to works done by famous artists......

Rutting and Nothingness

John Powers
Photo by Neil Davidson The dankly compelling Young Adam is adapted from the slim 1954 cult novel by the Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi, a minor but pungent talent whose gutbucket existentialism is in the tradition of Roberto Arlt’s 7 Madmen, George Simenon’s Dirty Snow and any Jim Thompson book......

Bang Bang Kiss Kiss

John Powers
Photo by Andrew Copper When we last met The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, she’d just spent a good 20 minutes dispatching psycho schoolgirl Go-Go Subari, chopping her way through 88 crazy yakuzas, and killing O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) in a hushed moonlit courtyard. Even those of......